Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Midweek Notes

Arlington is the largest city in the United States without transit, but will run trains through the city for the Superbowl coming in 2011.~~~Vancouver does Granny Flats in high rises.~~~Seattle Mayoral candidate McGinn is floating ideas for another light rail election in two years. But by light rail does he mean rapid streetcar or light metro?~~~A dustup over trolley buses in Seattle. I'd be interested to see if the bean counters actually did a lifecycle analysis considering how long electric trolleybuses actually last. Anyone who takes away existing hydro powered transit and replaces it with diesel needs a head check. It's unfortunate that it is even being discussed at all.~~~The economy isn't being so kind to mixed use projects in Atlanta.

6 comments:

Edmonton's trolleybuses are now gone. Philadelphia got funded for all their lines, but abandoned the southside routes.

A friend who recently visited Dayton said their trolleybuses would probably be gone in a year.

I remember visiting Dayton in the late 1960's, back when it was the privately-owned City Transit Company. At the time, route 1, the Third Street line, was every five minutes on weekdays off-peak. Now it's every half hour.

There were once 60 cities in North America with trolleybuses. Looks like we're headed for just four: Vancouver, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Boston.

What a shame. This is what comes of all the disinformation about electric transportation coming out of groups like reason.org.

I haven't seen anything published. My friend from Pennsylvania based his conclusion on intuition: the depressed state of Dayton's post-industrial economy, the drastic cutbacks in scheduled service, the loss of several trolley bus lines since we were there in the 1960's and the fetish transit planners have for internal combustion.

I will of course be overjoyed if this prediction turns out to be false.

Here are some pictures I took on August 31, 1969. What a nice transit system this was compared to today.

Why should they let the trolleybuses go in Dayton and Seattle, as much as they have in Edmonton recently and in Toronto and nearby Hamilton, ON in the 1990s? This isn't looking very good.

Hamilton is, by the way, apparently looking at LRT currently. This would be good in the sense of a "rapid streetcar" for an area of half a million people, as with the nearby Waterloo Region, where LRT is in planning.

Excellent photos. Even then, Halifax, Nova Scotia was still running trolleybuses until the end of the 1960s!!

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